The Wikileaks case, for which Chelsea Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison, was at the time the largest leak of secret US documents in history. Private Manning, then Bradley Manning before his sex change operation, leaked more than 700,000 confidential files to the portal of the ‘hacker’ and activist Julian Assange. His action put the US government in check and made Assange and Wikileaks relevant, which went from being a minority website to becoming one of the biggest fears of US intelligence.
WikiLeaks became a real headache for many governments, companies and individuals in various countries who were threatened by its publication of confidential information. For many, it became a symbol of press freedom and investigative journalism. But for others, like the US government, it crossed red lines by publishing sensitive data that could pose a threat to national security.
Founded in 2006, this website publishes documents and images generally leaked by publicly unidentified sources in order to uncover scandals and corruption cases that they considered to be in the public interest.
The stage of greatest popularity for WikiLeaks came from 2010, with the massive leak of classified material from the US Army about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. That year, for example, he released a 2007 video of US soldiers firing from a helicopter in Baghdad, killing more than 10 civilians, including a Reuters reporter and then at the end of that same year, the largest data leak occurred, in which Washington accused former soldier and Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning of being behind these leaks that caused a great scandal around the world.
The former US military intelligence analyst was pardoned in 2017 by Barack Obama just before leaving the White House, although she was arrested after refusing to testify in a trial against WikiLeaks.
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